Voicemail has been around since 1980. Back then you can see how it was all the rage to leave personal voice messages to another person. It was kind of like a new and modern form of sending letters. Instead no postage was required, no tedious handwriting involved, and your message was sent instantly. You could call someone just to say hi and if they didn’t answer, your voicemail would still do the deed for you. Flash-forward a few decades later – voicemail messages have become a nuisance to listen to and nobody wants to leave them when the person they’re calling can’t answer the phone.

We’ve developed this need for constant movement in our lives and anything that stops us from instantly getting onto the next thing we want to do is quickly forgotten or replaced with something better. But a unique thing is happening with voicemail. For one thing, voicemail refuses to become irrelevant because simply put, you need voicemail. And secondly, voicemail is slowly evolving into visual voicemail.

You may have noticed that your carrier of choice and others are starting to push for visual voicemail as a new feature that you can subscribe to and purchase. In other words, voicemail is not fading. And it’s not your voicemail’s fault that your messages pile up, your callers get a voicemail box full message, or you forget to listen to your messages. Just like you put effort into managing email to make it work for you, you should be doing the same with voicemail. The messages contained in your voicemail box are sometimes more important than emails and it’s our duty to make sure we are modernizing the way we handle voicemail and using it effectively.

Here Are 7 Signs Your Method of Voicemail Handling is Outdated:

  1. You don’t listen to your messages before calling someone back. This is a bad habit to develop – especially for professionals. If a client has left you a voicemail message, an important comment or question is probably in that message. Listen to their voicemail, figure out what they need to discuss with you and address that when you call them back for a much smoother and quicker conversation.
  2. You don’t delete your messages after you no longer need them. This will ultimately lead to #3 but this habit has its other faults too. When you keep every voicemail you receive, you make it harder for yourself to bring up important ones later on. Say, a caller left you a message about rescheduling their appointment but it’s buried under a bunch of messages you don’t need. You’re only giving yourself more work to do and losing time as you listen through countless voicemail messages till you find that particular one.
  3. Your inbox keeps getting full. A full inbox means your callers will no longer be able to leave you a voicemail until you clear out your inbox. Imagine a potential client not being able to leave you a message and how that reflects on your professionalism. Your best solution is to delete messages right after you listen to them or after they’re no longer important.
  4. You don’t save your important messages and end up losing them. On the opposite side of not deleting your messages, if you forget to save an important message and it passes the common 30-day mark of how long your messages are stored on your phone – you can say goodbye to that message forever. It’s gone and there’s no way to resurrect it. If you need to keep certain messages for extended lengths of time for whatever reason, you’ll have to manually re-save it before it’s too late. You can also use YouMail to save audio recordings of your messages to your computer or mark them as favorites and never lose them.
  5. Your voicemail recording was made a year ago. When was the last time you listened to your voicemail greeting? If you don’t even know what it sounds like, stop right now and listen to it. You should give it a refresher at least once a year to make sure it reflects your current job title etc.
  6. You forget to take down important messages. If you get a lot of client messages with information like meeting times and dates or phone numbers, you tend to write them down really quickly on whatever writing surface you can find… only to lose it later. Or maybe you don’t even get to take it down in time and you end up re-listening to that lengthy message a couple more times. For this situation, it’s best to invest in a voicemail-to-text service to get transcriptions of your messages instantly. Check out YouMail’s different plans  that offer voicemail-to-text here.
  7. You don’t have a voicemail box set up. No matter how tedious you think it is to listen to voicemail messages. You should definitely have a voicemail box set up. It lets your callers know you actually care about their calls even when you can’t answer them and delivers a lot of important messages to you that you don’t want to miss out on. Imagine you checked your phone and saw 5 missed calls from one person and when you called them back, they didn’t answer. Wouldn’t you want to know why they called? If you had a voicemail box set up, you’d already know.

Voicemail has come a long way, and it will continue to be an important part of our everyday lives until we can teleport ourselves or send holograms to each other. It’s the closest way for potential clients to reach out to you if you can’t answer your phone. Get rid of these 7 bad voicemail handling habits and use your voicemail more efficiently.

About YouMail-

YouMail is a visual voicemail app that helps millions of customers lead more productive lives. Discover innovative ways to keep your clients happy, save more time in your work week, and handle messages in the most hassle-free way possible. Get YouMail today and see how much more you can do with smarter voicemail handling – It’s free!